Lost
        Patti Smith

She learns that the things she carries—her camera,
the coat she wore to speak with the dead—recoil from her,

fall away. They do not come when she calls, and she calls.
Her bags still at the hotel, with the book she'd read

and reread, the photos taken in perfect light. All gone.
She's left to walk through the city streets

with only the clothes on her back, and the dreams
she never fails to record in her notebook.

                        *****

She took her camera back to the cemetery
but the season had changed, or it was still spring

but no longer evening, or the wind was blowing
from another quarter. The light was sharper

or more diffident. She found herself thinking
of coffee, its fragrance cupped in her hands,

instead of the voice she had come there to hear.
Too much to ask that it speak once more.

                        *****

I touch the keys in my pocket, again and again;
in another city, the plastic card to open the door.

The weight of my phone. Both gloves in my purse.
I keep the books that matter all in one room

with a door that closes, drawings and prints
on every wall, desk cluttered with intricate carvings.

But neither the dead nor my dreams will stay with me,
and there are friends I have not seen in years.

                        *****

Our lost do not come back like the cats
that walk into the next room in order to cry out

and wait for us to call. It is tempting to think
that the lost return to the places we found them:

a favorite earring into the hands of the woman
who made it, the book with its marginal notes

to the dusty corner of a second-hand bookstore.
Perhaps I dreamt and then lost the words
on the page, the song I remember her playing.

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Copyright © 2020 Susanna Lang All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission